| dc.description.abstract | The rise of the fourth industrial revolution prompts smart manufacturing to be an important issue for companies. Many scholars and experts have also researched fields related
to smart manufacturing to help manufacturers innovate and improve their production. To further understand the research development of smart manufacturing, distance-based and
time-based network analysis approaches were proposed to examine the smart manufacturing related research articles from the Web of Science database in last thirty years. Topic modeling method was also adopted to conduct text mining on the abstract of journal papers to identify the key patterns of smart manufacturing literatures. Accordingly, five types of network clusters and five main research topics related to smart manufacturing were identified. The network analysis results show five different types of major academic clusters, including (1) the four co-authorship network clusters; (2) the four citation-by-sources network clusters, of which the longest time duration was the engineering and artificial intelligence cluster, followed by the industrial information integration system and manufacturing cluster; (3) the four co-occurrence keywords network clusters; (4) the six bibliographic coupling network clusters and the representative literature in each cluster, in which the major research networks in recent years were incorporation of social services into smart manufacturing systems,
vertical integration mechanisms in smart manufacturing, technological development of the manufacturing industry and factories in the Industry 4.0, and big data analytics technology in smart manufacturing; and (5) the five historical research network constituted of key research
topics and the influential papers in each period. In addition, the results of topic analysis indicate that the five most common research topics among smart manufacturing literature over the years were as follows: researching algorithms and learning network models for improving
manufacturing efficiency, Internet of Things network security and communications technology, factory technology and management in the Industry 4.0, monitoring equipment
and procedural monitoring, and architectural design of intelligent control systems. The results from this research can help corporate decision-makers evaluate and analyze smart manufacturing production and investment decisions. Besides, technological innovators, scholars, and experts can gain comprehensive insights into the latest theories and research development in smart manufacturing, thereby facilitate further research and innovations. | en_US |